April 23, 2007

Eating pop rocks and Coke at the same time will make your head explode. The 809 area code scam. Some Scandinavian county banned Donald Duck because he doesn’t wear pants. Urban legends are fun.

A blog that I read regularly runs a weekly column on Comic Book Urban Legends. I find it pretty interesting because, well, . . . I love comic books. I don’t talk about the fascinating facts and obscure trivia that I learn from the running series in my own blog because I figure anyone really interested in such stuff already knows about the blog.

However, last week they dedicated a whole post to debunking a series of Comic Book Urban Legends surrounding Earth’s Mightiest Mortal – and one of my favorite comic book heroes – Captain Marvel.

They shed light on lots of wild stuff from when DC Comics was re-launching the character in the 1970’s after licensing the rights to Captain Marvel from Fawcett Comics. Apparently DC had a hard time figuring out how to position the character in context with their own super-powered demi-god with a chiseled chin and cape, Superman. All sorts of ideas were thrown against the wall to see what would stick. In the end they just let Captain Marvel come back in essentially the same format that he left back in the 1950s.

But all those ideas kept circulating around for the next twenty years, eventually making their way into one version of the character at some point.

But one of those ideas kicked around never made it to print: African-American Captain Marvel.

Obliviously that idea never got green-lit, but it certainly would have been interesting if it had. One, it would have helped DC establish a hero that wasn't another white male. Two, if DC had later on decided to switch back to the whitebread version of Captain Marvel C.C. Beck created so many years ago, they would have had quite the revision to write themselves out of.

Personally, I wish DC had taken the chance on totally re-working the character.